UT’s Marco Institute to Host Manuscript Workshop Feb. 3–4

KNOXVILLE—The Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will host its seventh manuscript workshop February 3–4.

The workshop, “Readers,” will be held in Room 440 of the Haslam Business Building both days and is free and open to the public.

The focus of the workshop will be the relationship between a text and its readers. People sometimes respond to what they are reading by creating new texts of their own. Often they also leave traces of their reading in other material ways: physical wear and tear, annotations and corrections in the margins, and the purposeful grouping or arrangement of books in a library. Workshop participants will explore various kinds of evidence for such reciprocal engagement between texts and readers.

The workshop is designed for scholars and students who engage in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy (the study of ancient inscriptions). Researchers will present their own works in progress, and discuss unusual manuscript problems, practical difficulties, and new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts.

The two days will unfold more like a class than a conference as speakers share their own new discoveries and unfinished work, discuss both their successes and frustrations, and offer practical advice and theoretical insights.

The workshop is sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies with support from the Humanities Initiative and the Office of Research at the University of Tennessee.